Dumb celebs and other menaces: the day after the day after Manchester

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that in the aftermath of a tragedy a celebrity in a wont of brains (but I largely repeat myself) will say something stupid. First cab off the rank this time was everyone’s favourite good Christian girl who kissed another girl and she liked it, and years later is now a part of the anti-Trump “resistance” (I use quotation marks in this case out of respect for the hundreds of thousands of Europeans who fought and gave their lives in the real Resistance).

https://twitter.com/katyperry/status/829923756826955776

There you go, people; first we had the protest rock of the 1960s and 70s, and now Katy Perry will give us gyrating SJW pop fluff. Anyway, Perry had this to say in a radio interview the day after the Manchester atrocity:

“Whatever we say behind people’s backs, the Internet can be a little bit ruthless as far as fan bases go but I think that the greatest thing we can do is just unite and love on each other,” Perry said, adding, “No barriers, no borders, we all just need to co-exist.”

In fairness, the first part of that sentiment referred to foregoing any pop start feuds (I’m sure that ISIS will chalk it up as a major defeat that Perry and Ariana Granda and their fan bases now love each other very much), but the second part is both gratuitous and brainless. But I nevertheless expect Perry to demolish the wall around her mansion and forego any security measures at her concerts, in case a jihadi suicide bomber wants to hug her. It still doesn’t occur to some people that men who detonate themselves amongst the crowd of teenage girls maybe, just maybe don’t want to co-exits with us, no matter how nice and loving and embracing we are.

Then we had another pop star, this time home-grown British radical, Lily Allen. Allen is famous for her apology in the Calais refugee camp to a young Afghan: “We’ve bombed your country, put you in the hands of the Taliban and now put you in danger of risking your life to get into our country. I apologise on behalf of my country. I’m sorry for what we have put you through.” Then hilarious thing happened when it was revealed that the refugee’s father, who lives in the UK since 1995, was a former Islamist warlord who escaped the Western-backed Northern Alliance, was granted refugee status, and then proceeded to nevertheless travel back to Afghanistan twice for extended holidays. And now Lily had this to say:

Just think about it – Lily is so woke that she’s not defending Muslims or Islam in general and as a whole – she is defending Islamists, the extremists who at best put women in burqas and lock them away (like in, for example, Saudi Arabia) or throw acid in their faces and kill them for daring to go to school or show their face (like in, for example, Afghanistan). These men apparently don’t hate women any more than I do, or any other man living in the UK or Australia. You have to be Western, wealthy and famous to be this deluded.

And there is this exchange with Piers Morgan on the same day:

But enough about oxygen thieves.

Now time for an “oops” moment. Yesterday I had this to say about the bomber and his family based on early media reports:

We now know that the suicide bomber was a 23-year old Salman Abedi, Manchester-born child of refugees from Libya. A university drop-out, he apparently started growing his beard and publicly expressing religiosity a year ago, and might have sneaked in and out of Syria while travelling to visit relatives back in Libya. He is yet another bloody example of de-assimilation at work in Western societies. His family, by all accounts so far, is decent and hard-working, with a blue-collar father who wanted to provide a better future for his four children, and his sister Jomana a glam (and very un-conservative) social media butterfly.

“We have evidence that he is involved in Daesh (Islamic State) with his brother. We have been following him for more than one month and a half,” a spokesman for a local counter-terrorism force told Reuters.

“He was in contact with his brother and he knew about the attack.”

The Tripoli-based anti-terrorism Special Deterrent Force said Hashem, 20, confessed that both he and Salman were a part of IS.

Salman’s father, Ramadan Abedi, was also detained by Libyan authorities on Wednesday.

The arrests in Tripoli follow the earlier arrest of Salman’s other brother Ismail, 23, in Manchester.

Time will tell, but perhaps not a “lone wolf” after all, but part of a pack of jihadi werewolves, or werehyenas.

Lastly, my favourite Marxist, Brendan O’Neill, make a good point about terrorism:

This is a very important issue, and an important distinction, I’ve blogged about in the past too: we should not fear terrorism, but we should not accept it either.

It is very true that the odds of dying in a terrorist attack are minuscule compared to other, everyday vicissitudes of life. This is what I have told all my friends when they were asking me last year if I wasn’t concerned about travelling around Western Europe, to places like Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam or Antwerp, and eventually to Cairo in Egypt. No, because it is far more likely I get run over (accidentally) when crossing the road (particularly in Cairo, which neither knows nor respects traffic lights) than in a bomb explosion. In this sense we indeed shouldn’t let terrorists stop us from enjoying our lives. But the fact that terrorism is a relatively rare event (compared to car accidents or accidental drownings) does not mean we should fatalistically accept it as “the new normal”, somehow a part of our daily lives now, just like the said accidents. Terrorism is not an accident; it’s a purposeful act of political violence. Treat it accordingly.